New plugin for Johnny Five

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@mwitting
Thanks a lot for this great plugin!!!
I want to use the RPi/Arduinos/Pimatic for a new open source energy managment system, which should act as the following:
RPi2 with pimatic <-> LAN <-> Wiznet5100 <-> Mega2560 with Firmata <-> IO-extension.
http://www.photovoltaikforum.com/smart-grids-f138/osems-open-source-energy-managment-system-t110566.html#p1333201
Sorry it’s German, but there are less alternatives for EMS.

So the normal connection by serial/USB should be replaced with LAN. It’s caused by longer distance between RPi2 and the Mega2560 (~10m). I know, that some FHEM-freaks use the configurable Firmata with Perl on serverside. It would be a keyfeature doing this with the nice Pimatic-soft.
I’m more the hardware freak so I ask for help for the Software-part. How can I help to speed up the “LAN-Johnny-Five-plugin”?
iot

@Hr-FS Thanks for your positive feedback. Your project sonds really interesting and I am happy to help you. I have some basic understanding of the “EMS” and also looked into OGEMA (at an early stage) a couple of years ago.

As outlined on Chat I have done some tethering experiments, but did not have the opportunity yet to test the Arduino-Ethernet yet, as I do not have an Arduino with LAN right now.

Yes - OGEMA is the goal but sounds a bit too big at the moment. So the intention is to develop a prototype of open source EMS which can control devices (heat pump, AC/DC-converters with 0-5V input or RS485 ModbusRTU, swiches …). On the input side we need values from powermeters like e UEM-80 or EM300 (with existing openhab-bindung).

The problem is that devices are not at the same place. If every device would get an own RPi I think thats overkill (people in pv-forum suggested this).
So the Arduinos as “extended arm” of the controlling RPi looks more perfect. The main advantage would be only no or less updates of firmata and only 1 RPi-system with (maintained) Linux.
iot

I have recently updated the plugin to provided support for Expander boards, and to provide improved support for setup of remote boards. See “Progress and Next Steps” section in the first post.

Unfortunately there is also an installation problem if you’re planning to use “raspi-io”. See “Issues” sections for details.

@mwittig

I tested PCA9685 expander at raspi-io and works great.

I can not find out how converts JF received levels . Your module uses: level * 255 / 100. But what gave the JF I can not detect.

I want to fit MQTT dimmer configurable range: Meanwhile, I have:
pimatic (0-100)
8 bit
12 bit
(Another thing that would fit into the Super Dimmer)

I have this card, order still Arduino with Ethernet and test it.
With Johnny Five module could be interesting Dimmer, controllable via Ethernet.

@wutu said:

I can not find out how converts JF received levels .

Sorry. I missed this one. As this is mapped internally to a J5 LED it has 8 bit resolution. It might be insufficient if the expanders supports 12-bit resolution and you wish to control at this granularity. For this I would need to change the code to use the board I/O API directly or may some other driver serves the needs (may be servo?).

I like your concept of Super Dimmer and I am happy to promote it for integration into the pimatic core. I need to have closer look at your code though.

Thanks for the reply. I have adjustable resolution for dimmer in MQTT module. But I’m not sure if it would not become the responsibility of the developer module.

P.S. Perhaps it can even write better. Perhaps it can write better. But so far it’s the only way I know how.

Version 0.8.8 released - see first post for details

Today I have managed to run the firmata sketch on Wemos D1 and to run a simple J5 blink LED demo. So, ESP-8266 support as part of pimatic-johnny-five is probably just a matter of a few weeks now. For pimatic, it is probably less exciting as we already have ESPimatic and ESPeasy which serve very well for most use cases. However, there may some used cases which benefit from J5’s large base of supported sensors and actuators and the possibility to seamlessly use a variety of boards in a single setup.

The firmata changes have not been released yet and can be found on the “esp” branch.
https://github.com/firmata/arduino/tree/esp

Hi, i have a little suggest for the device documentation. I tried to implement a JohnnyFivePwmOutput device for a raspi-io board and stuck at the configuration. My main problem was the pin address, because i used the GPIO pin number intentionally. After a lot of debugging and reading the dependencies, i found out, that i have to take another pin notation.

P1-12 instead of the GPIO ID, the wipiring ID or what ever.

Here a example of my working JohnnyFivePwmOutput device configuration:

{
      "pin": "P1-12",
      "boardId": "raspberry-pi",
      "id": "dimmer-test",
      "name": "Dimmer Test",
      "class": "JohnnyFivePwmOutput"
    }

For the future it would be nice to add a hint, what exactly pin address means for the specific board. For example a small table with all supported boards and a example pin mapping would be helpful to have a better understand of the configuration (especially for the raspi-io board).

But finally the plugin and the device work’s very fine! Good job.

@possmann said in New plugin for Johnny Five:

For the future it would be nice to add a hint, what exactly pin address means for the specific board. For example a small table with all supported boards and a example pin mapping would be helpful to have a better understand of the configuration (especially for the raspi-io board).

Thank you very much for your feedback. I am sorry for the delay in reply, I’ll definitely take this into account.
https://github.com/mwittig/pimatic-johnny-five/issues/48

@possmann said in New plugin for Johnny Five:

Hi, i have a little suggest for the device documentation. I tried to implement a JohnnyFivePwmOutput device for a raspi-io board and stuck at the configuration. My main problem was the pin address, because i used the GPIO pin number intentionally. After a lot of debugging and reading the dependencies, i found out, that i have to take another pin notation.
P1-12 instead of the GPIO ID, the wipiring ID or what ever.

For your information, I have added a document on pin naming which will be published shortly. It can be found at: https://github.com/mwittig/pimatic-johnny-five/blob/master/assets/docs/pin-naming.md

Meanwhile, Johnny Five has evolved and besides the header/pin naming scheme it is also possible to use pin names, e.g. GPIO18, or WiringPi pin numbers, e.g. 1. See pin naming document for further information.